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The Regenerative Rebellion with Joel Salatin
514 Plays24 days ago
Joel Salatin is one of the most influential voices in the modern regenerative farming movement. As the founder of Polyface Farm in Virginia, he’s become known for building a radically different model of agriculture, one rooted in ecological systems, local markets, and a refusal to accept industrial “efficiency” as the end goal.
In this episode, Joel shares what he’s learned from decades of farming and advocacy, why the middle of the food system is where so many good farms get stuck, and what it will take to move regenerative agriculture to the center of our food system.
In this episode, we dive into:
• Why the industrial food system prioritizes scale and uniformity over real stewardship
• What we lose when farming becomes a commodity business instead of a community livelihood
• The biggest barriers that keep good farms from reaching more people
• Why local processing and local markets matter more than most people realize
• How Polyface built an alternative model that actually works economically
• What it would take for regenerative agriculture to become “normal” again
• Why Joel thinks the story we tell about food is just as important as the practices
• Where he sees real hope, and what he thinks we need to stop pretending will fix things
More about Joel:
Joel Salatin co-owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Featured in the New York Times bestseller Omnivore’s Dilemma and award-winning documentary Food Inc., the farm services more than 5,000 families, 10 restaurants, and 5 retail outlets with salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry, and forestry products. The farm ships nationwide to your doorstep.
Salatin is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement. He writes the “Confessions of a Steward” column for Plain Values magazine, the “Homestead Abundance” column for Homestead Living magazine, columns for Homesteaders of America, and a column a month for the e-magazine Manward. His blog is Musings from the Lunatic Farmer and he co-hosts a podcast titled BEYOND LABELS with co-author Dr. Sina McCullough.
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
Shifting Agricultural Strategies
00:00:00
Speaker
So we strategically exchange pharmaceutical intensity, capital intensity, and energy intensity for people intensity, because that's going exactly the opposite direction that mainline agriculture and food is going. They're all trying to figure out how do we farm without any people.
00:00:20
Speaker
We're trying to figure out how many people can we can we put on this farm. In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access.
00:00:34
Speaker
Rural economies are hollowing out. But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
00:00:51
Speaker
Joel, thank you so much for joining me today and having this conversation.
Regenerative Agriculture: Past and Present
00:00:54
Speaker
What I'm really excited to be able to talk about is get a little bit of historical perspective. And we're not talking ancient history. I'm really interested to know over the last, let's say 50 years,
00:01:06
Speaker
how this regenerative agriculture agrarian movement has changed and shifted because you've been at the forefront of that for quite a long time now. There's probably no better person out there in order to have the perspective over the last 30, 50 years.
00:01:21
Speaker
If you could for me, could you sketch a picture of where things were in, let's call it regenerative agriculture? and especially regenerative grazing. 50 years ago, could you buy grass-fed, grass-finished beef in the grocery store? Could you buy a pastured poultry in the grocery store? Was that a thing? Or if you couldn't find it in the grocery store, could you find a farmer who was raising those?
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, so those are all those are all really good pinpoint questions. And and so the answer the answer to all all of them is no. You got to realize that our culture...
00:02:00
Speaker
moved, I mean, 1837. 1837 is the official beginning of the Industrial Revolution. That's when Cyrus McCormick invented the the Reaper. It's also the year that Justice von Liebig found at nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus in his vacuum tube bottles and said nature was ah just a rearrangement of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. Between the mechanization and the chemicalization, that really spawned the Industrial Revolution It came on like a juggernaut, of course, through the 1800s into the nineteen hundred and morphed into the factory, the automobile, and the elimination of draft power on farms. Up until tractors, one-third at least of every farm was devoted to pasture for draft animals. Well, pasture generally is a healing time for the soil.
The Rise of Mechanized Farming
00:02:49
Speaker
We talk about, you know, exploitation versus recovery, that perennial natural ground cover beats crops and monoculture. So draft power held the ability to exploit and destroy the soil fast under tillage and monocrops. It held that exploitation at bay because you needed you need almost half your farm to just grow your energy.
00:03:13
Speaker
So once the petroleum kicked in with tractors and we no longer needed to draft animals, then we could plow fence row to fence row. You might ah remember Earl Butch, you know, and in fact, fences disappeared from farmland. and You can drive up now through Indiana, Iowa, Northern Ohio, and never see a fence, you know, for miles and miles and miles. All those farms had livestock, a livestock and a pasture component.
00:03:39
Speaker
So the same thing was playing out, of course, in the food system as the whole economy moved into the industrial economy. People needed to ah move to the cities for places to work and that eliminated gardens. And now you have, you know, convenience food. And then as things developed, women began to work outside the home, which now nobody's home to cook, nobody's home to garden, nobody's home to can.
00:04:02
Speaker
And so we started getting squeezable Velveeta cheese, TV dinners, and convenience foods. We decided as a culture that breastfeeding was Neanderthal, you know. developed Infamil and Similac and raised generation of asthmatic sufferers who weren't getting breast milk. And all this began to change during the Vietnam era as young people began to question the institutional narrative. Until then, you know the greatest generation of the World War II generation, they were all about duty, obligation, responsibility, loyalty, and it was esprit de corps, you know loyalty to the cause. The Vietnam War started to break that that trust.
00:04:42
Speaker
And as that trust began to break, well, we started seeing the early hippie back to the land movement. We started seeing La Lesche League, you know, natural childbirth. All these things began developing in the early 70s during this time.
00:04:56
Speaker
The other thing that happened during that time, I think it's important to realize that the infrastructure, the mechanics to be able to do a non-chemical scalable agriculture did not really exist until the early 1960s. When Sir Albert Howard
Non-Chemical Farming Infrastructure
00:05:14
Speaker
developed the scientific basis for aerobic compost during the 20s, 30s, and forty s in India, and then wrote his iconic you know and agricultural testament that came to the world in 1943, we didn't have the components to enable efficient
00:05:33
Speaker
scientific composting. We didn't have chippers. We didn't have front end loaders. We didn't have PTO powered manure spreaders. We didn't have black plastic pipe. and We didn't have a chainsaw. Chainsaw was not really developed until 1957.
00:05:46
Speaker
So the idea of running a fertility program based on biomass. mean We didn't even have balers for hay and for straw and stuff. I mean, we were still using pitchforks. and and And so there was no real infrastructure and mechanism for an efficient biomass carbon centric system of agronomy until the early 1960s. And we started getting front end loaders, hydraulics, PTO powered manure spreaders, the chainsaw. and chippers and black plastic pipe and for water delivery. And all of that was developing in the 60s.
00:06:21
Speaker
that for the first time enabled a biomass-centric or carbon-centric fertility program to compete with chemical fertilizers. that That was not possible for about 20 years. So chemicals had the ascendancy because you could spread them easily and they didn't need to be shoveled.
00:06:39
Speaker
So it wasn't until we could stop shoveling and start handling bulky carbon material efficiently that we actually had a viable alternative to scalable chemical approaches in the 1960s. Well, but by that time, by that time, the chemical companies owned agriculture. By that time, they permeated the land-grant universities. The factory system permeated the home.
00:07:00
Speaker
The home had become a pit stop for life, TV dinners, and convenience foods. The old 1940s and 50s, quote-unquote, homemaker was replaced by the working mom. And I'm not trying to be anything condescending here. I'm i'm just, under this is the history. And so we enter the 70s and there's suddenly this huge cultural shift in yearning for for roots again, for roots.
00:07:23
Speaker
And we have this movement. I mean, you know, Mother Earth News magazine starts up and we enter the So by the 80s, we had... we had really, really functional electric fencing. I mean, I can remember as a kid in the early 60s, the electric fence energizers were little six-volt batteries powering remodeled or you know repurposed points and condensers out of cars. I was a little kid, you know you'd have a little pocket of emery cloth in your pocket And every time you go by the Energizer, you'd reach over, open the box, you know full of spider webs and flies and stuff. You'd clean it out and you'd you'd rub the points, you know, with that little Emory cloth, sign them up so you get spark.
00:08:04
Speaker
and And so dependable electric fence was not even really in the cards until the late 1960s. I mean, our first Sears and Roebuck solid state Energizer is still up in the shop. We don't use it anymore. It's a museum piece now. But you that was a big deal when when they got away from the physical points and conditions, you know, bing bang, bang, bang, bang.
00:08:25
Speaker
Here's my point. By the 80s, the infrastructure was in place to efficiently compete with every chemical option, but the other side had a, literally a 20 to 30 year head start in the race.
00:08:42
Speaker
Our side, I'm going to say our side has still been trying to catch up with that, you know, ever since now we are, and in production comparison and all sorts of things, we are way, way ahead, but the culture, the culture has recognized it yet culturally.
00:08:57
Speaker
A lot of people are recognizing it. And now, of course, we've thrown sickness into the pot and Americans are the sickest. We're the sickest country in the world. And so that chemical run, if you will, is beginning to you know exceed its its effectiveness. And that's now driving an interest in better food. That's a real short history lesson, I hope, that's helpful to for people to to understand where we are. i would just conclude with this. I would say, you know, if we had had a man Manhattan project, you know, that's what developed the atomic bomb. If we'd had had a Manhattan project for compost, we would have been just fine without any chemical development at all. And it's unfortunate that we didn't
Challenges of Scaling Regenerative Agriculture
00:09:39
Speaker
get that done.
00:09:40
Speaker
It seems that one of the main factors that is going to slow down the regenerative agriculture movement is that it is much harder to capitalize on or centralize and monopolize, whereas chemical inputs and commodity agriculture, that is in the hands of relatively few people that make a lot of money off of what they do. And they can take that excess money and they can put that into spinning research into their direction. They can put that into ag policy and getting more federal dollars coming their ways. And this more grass-based, pasture-based, regenerative style of agriculture
00:10:22
Speaker
It doesn't scale very well. It replicates very well, but it does not scale into really, really large farms that have a lot of money and a lot of capital to put towards influence.
00:10:35
Speaker
That's an interesting observation. I will say that we don't make an apology for saying our scaling. so So let's talk about scaling.
00:10:45
Speaker
but So you you can scale two different ways. You can scale by centralization, consolidation, or you can scale by duplication. In our approach, we make a big deal of we're scaling by duplication,
00:11:00
Speaker
not by concentration, centralization, and consolidation. Of course, duplication is the way nature does. You don't get more people by having a bigger person.
00:11:12
Speaker
You have a baby and you have another person. Trees don't scale by having a bigger tree. They drop acorns and make additional trees. And so the the duplication concept is a fundamental economy of the ecology.
00:11:29
Speaker
The centralization approach is a fundamental concept of an inanimate mechanical thing. If you're running mechanics, yeah, you want... The biggest front end loader you can find, the biggest truck you can find, the biggest, you know, pipe bender you can find, the biggest ship you can find to transport more stuff. You know, in mechanics, scaling on site in situ is part of efficiency. But in nature, scaling is always done differently.
00:11:58
Speaker
By having
Consumer Impact on Food Systems
00:11:59
Speaker
babies. yeah absolutely the unfortunate dynamic though is that money speaks right and having a concentration of money in the pockets of large agribusiness companies that they will will make that money speak for them if you have one large agribusiness company that is going to have a larger voice in certain parts of our let's say political system or our lobbying system then a hundred or even a thousand small entities that don't have a lot of excess money to throw that direction.
00:12:33
Speaker
That's true, which is why ultimately our food and farm system is completely dependent on non-farmers, on consumers, because we simply don't have enough farmers with political clout to move the needle. And that's what we're seeing with the Maha movement. The Maha movement was not started by farmers.
00:12:53
Speaker
The Maha movement was primarily lending a voice to parents with vaccine-injured kids. I mean, I'll just say it outright. And those vaccine-injured kids' parents were kicked to the side. They were marginalized. They were told they had psychological problems. They were told it's all in your head. You know, you're being ah critical of a good thing.
00:13:14
Speaker
And they got tired of it, frankly. And that's what's empowering the Maha movement. And so anybody who thinks that those of us non-chemical, I'll just call us compost farmers,
00:13:27
Speaker
Those of us compost farmers, our voice is simply not big enough or strong enough. It's only big enough and strong enough as we align with the growing thousands of people who distrust Tyson, who distrust the USDA, who distrust the chemical and pharmaceutical narrative.
00:13:47
Speaker
And that's That's the only thing that speaks more powerful than money. And ultimately, that is money because that's power. ah Ultimately, farmers have always grown to the market. You know, I'm tired of hearing people blame the farmer for this and blame the farmer for that. We have exactly the food and farm sector that our marketplace has asked for.
00:14:07
Speaker
That's exactly what we have. They want cheap food. And they want junk food. They want convenience. That's exactly what we've got. And if we're going to have a different future, we need a different demand in the marketplace. If food buyers demand, you know, compost-grown tomatoes, guess what farmers will do? They'll grow compost-grown tomatoes.
00:14:25
Speaker
I would love to see a one-day smokeout, you know, American smokeout, where no nobody smokes cigarettes for a day. It's a great American smokeout for one day. and Can you imagine a one-week fast food out? you Nobody's going to eat fast food for one week.
00:14:40
Speaker
Let me tell you, it would it would bring the entire industrial food system to a screeching halt. In one week, no law, no agency, no government bureaucrat, no nothing, just the freedom of the marketplace. I would love to see an initiative like that launched and just show who really has the power. Is it Tyson or is it the millions of people who buy from Tyson? That's who actually has the power.
00:15:04
Speaker
Well, let's jump into the consumer demand part of this. We've talked a good bit in the beginning about the technological advances that have pushed either the chemicalized side or the compost side forward and where we are now from that perspective. Maha, the Make America Healthy Again, that movement is, at least the Maha name, is quite recent. But then how has consumer demands, in your perspective, changed over the last, let's say, 30, 40, 50 years?
00:15:32
Speaker
It's unrecognizably changed. I mean, when we started, nobody even heard of the word O, the organic word. I mean, when we started, nobody even heard of organic. And so when we began direct selling to people, direct marketing, everybody thought they should get it cheaper because they were getting directly from a farmer.
00:15:51
Speaker
There was very little very little mentality in the culture for I'm going to pay more for better food. People bought directly from farmers not to get better food, but to get cheaper food. That was the table that we started in in our marketing. So what's changed in the culture now is that so many millions of people are understanding the disrespect of nutrition, disrespect of soil, and disrespect of farmer with a cheap food policy. And they're realizing, well, we either pay now or we pay the doctor, we pay the hospital, we pay the pharmaceutical company. In the last 40 years, the per capita expenditure on food has switched from 18% 9%, and the per capita expenditure
00:16:36
Speaker
on healthcare has flipped from 9% to 18%. I think it's amazing that those two numbers are so synchronous and have inverted in the last 40 years.
00:16:47
Speaker
And that's what's driving the the Maha movement. So yeah, I tell our young people today that yeah come that come to the farm for the apprenticeship stewardship and people that I come in contact with, man, I would love to start today.
00:17:00
Speaker
Starting today is so much better. I mean, we had to make phone calls. We sent letters by snail mail. I mean, there was no blogging, no, how do you tell your story? You know, it was, it was very difficult.
00:17:14
Speaker
The day, you know, you can tell your story. you can get it out there. You can yeah You can walk around, take pictures and post them in real time. It's it's pretty pretty amazing. So I think that the growing awareness and the access to the ability to communicate has revolutionized the marketing platform because Walmart and Costco do not have stories to tell.
00:17:39
Speaker
The only story they can tell is we're cheaper than the other guy. That's the only story they can tell. And we can tell a story about nutrition. We can tell health, earthworms, you know, happy animals. I mean, there's all sorts of stories we can tell.
00:17:52
Speaker
i love it. As we look ahead and we look at the direction that the field of farming, especially regenerative farming, is going, it seems to me that there's a real strong divergence in the paths, depending on what kind of agriculture we're talking about.
00:18:07
Speaker
So on the commodity side, growing commodity corn, soybeans, whatever it is, it seems that that will most likely continue to get aggregated into fewer and fewer hands.
Innovations in Livestock Farming
00:18:19
Speaker
It's a low margin game. You need a lot of money to get in and play it. And most likely you'll see that going into fewer and fewer hands as we've seen the trend over the last hundred years. So if I was a ah new farmer,
00:18:34
Speaker
looking at getting into farming, I would run away as fast as I could from commodity, corn, grains, all of that. And on the other hand, raising premium livestock on pasture, so not trying to compete with the same commodity farm food that's coming out of tyson or coming out of walmart but being able to raise a premium because those are harder to automate harder to industrialize you're able to grow something that is substantially better and now is easier to communicate the reason to pay more because it has more value it's healthier it's more nutritious but that seems like a much better way for the folks to go Now, Alan Nation writes in his book, Land, Livestock, and and Life, very well about the rules of the game and how those rules are different now than they were 50 years ago or 100 years ago, in that land is expensive. So you probably don't want to have to buy the land in order to farm it. If you can get access to the land and farm it, that would be a better way to do this. And then it seems that there's a third category of folks who...
00:19:44
Speaker
let's call them homesteaders, folks who, let's call it farming without the pressure of needing to make any money off of it. But it's farming for the fun, for the lifestyle, for the physical activity.
00:19:56
Speaker
They don't have to worry about making money off the farm. Either they made their money, they're still working off the farm. And that seems to be a huge rising tide of folks. Does that seem about right, that bifurcation or the different paths of going forward?
00:20:11
Speaker
Yeah, so Austin, i think you've I think you've painted the three groups actually quite well. I will say that the idea that commodity crops, the the chemical approach, is going to continue to go into fewer hands.
00:20:24
Speaker
We certainly see this can continued consolidation and all. You know Joel Arthur Barker wrote the book Paradigms, introduced the concept of the world. And one of his axioms of paradigms is that every paradigm eventually exceeds its point of efficiency.
00:20:39
Speaker
Even at commercial scale, the chemical approach still has problems. And bird flu is a perfect example of the fact that when you get that many animals concentrated in that unhygienic a situation,
00:20:54
Speaker
Nature tends to bat last. Nature tends to you know to take out biological things when they exceed their carrying capacity. I don't know how far that'll go. you know We're still losing two bushels of soil to every bushel of corn we grow. So I don't know how long that can go on. But in general, yes, the thrust of the chemical commercial approach is bigger chicken farms, bigger feedlots, bigger corn plants, more chemical fertilizer, blah, blah, blah.
00:21:24
Speaker
The second part here, what you call growers of premium food, will require a lot more people. So on our farm, we have kind of a three-point explanation for this and the fact that land is so expensive. So how do you start? Well, all you need is access. We have a kind of a three-point approach for germinating young farmers. How do you get in with the capital cost of land so high?
00:21:48
Speaker
Well, you start with a mobile farm. So the beauty of high-tech mobility, whether it's electric fencing, nursery shade cloth for portable shelter, water lines for moving water easily.
00:22:01
Speaker
The fact is that we have shelter control and watering systems now highly mobilized so that investing in those does not take a lot of money. Mobility with lightweight infrastructure has completely changed things.
00:22:17
Speaker
it It allows you to not have to own the land that your farm is on. And so portability is now enabled with high-tech, small-scale, or lightweight infrastructure. Next is modular infrastructure. So, you know, at our farm, you know, even though we're in pastured poultry, which is considered ah ah something that you can't scale, we've got enough housing of a Tyson chicken house.
00:22:41
Speaker
But it's not one Tyson chicken house. It's 160 field shelters. Okay. That's where you get modular. You get duplication through modular rather than centralization. And then, and then the third M, so we have mobile modular modular enables you to start small. You can start with one module. And then as you scale, you can add another module, another module and do it debt-free as you cashflow. That's ah a completely different, a different paradigm than the commercial, you know, build a a half a million dollar chicken house. and And the third is management intensive. Yes, it does take more people, but it doesn't take any pharmaceuticals, concrete, energy, fans, all the other things. And so so we strategically exchange pharmaceutical intensity, capital intensity, and energy intensity for people intensity.
00:23:34
Speaker
And that creates a moat against competition because that's going exactly the opposite direction that mainline agriculture and food is going.
00:23:45
Speaker
They're all trying to figure out how do we farm without any people We're trying to figure out how many people can we can we put on this farm. It's a completely completely different direction. And what's interesting is that when paradigms run out of steam, when everybody realizes the emperor doesn't have any clothes and they turn around and march a different way, the guys who were going the opposite direction from the norm go into first place. They become the leaders and turn around in the front.
00:24:11
Speaker
And then your third group of homesteaders is a burgeoning group right now. I mean, there are homestead... conferences and fairs popping up all over the country. And I think I go to half of them, but they're all over the place. And one of the things that I always ask when I've got, you know, a thousand rabid homesteaders in front of me, how many of you, if you could figure out how to leave your town job and make a living on your homestead, how many of you would do it?
00:24:37
Speaker
Every time more than half the hands go up. So I know, i know that out of these homesteaders, are going to come some really innovative new farmers. Interestingly, because of this very thing that you just mentioned, I did ah a kind of ah analysis a while back on our operation. How much land would we have to actually own to do what we do?
00:25:04
Speaker
here I mean, we've got a thousand head, almost a thousand head of cattle. We're running, you know, 800. Well, I mean, in the course of a year, we'll sell 800 hogs, 30,000 chickens. I mean, this is not a backyard operation.
00:25:16
Speaker
But I realized we would only need to really own about five acres. Oh, wow. We could lease everything else. All you need is a hub, a hub, you know, where you can put your freezer, your farm store, you know, your processing, a corral, a brooder, you know, a greenhouse, you know, those kinds of things. That doesn't take much land. Yeah.
00:25:38
Speaker
And then you get access to neighboring land. And that is becoming more available because the average farmer is now 60 years old, which means in the next 15 years, half of all America's agriculture equity, that's land, buildings, and equipment, half of it is going to change hands.
00:25:55
Speaker
And so that's why I'm on a bit of a a tangent to make sure that that land doesn't go to Bill Gates and BlackRock and Vanguard or the Chinese, but that it goes into the hands of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, entrepreneurial, self-starting young people.
00:26:10
Speaker
who are ready to jump on these opportunities and meet our culture with a new generation of stewards who caress the land instead of raping the
Emerging Agricultural Innovations
00:26:21
Speaker
land.
00:26:21
Speaker
So one last question here. You've got your finger on the pulse very, very well of what is going on and where things are moving. Where are you seeing developments that are, they're just taking a while to come about. They're taking a while to mature. Maybe there are ideas that germinated years ago, decades ago, that are just, they're slow to come about, slow to come to maturity, but they're going to make a real difference here in the next number of years or decades and potentially be inflection points that are really going to help us move this along faster. For an example, on my end, like I know very well, on the the tree nursery, the tree genetics side for silvopasture trees is that we haven't put any attention into the into those over the last 80 years or so. And now with a relatively small amount of attention being paid towards those, we'll have much better genetics, much better nursery stock available for folks who want to add trees into their pastures for shade and for feed.
00:27:22
Speaker
The difference between where we are now and where we're going to be in three or five years is very, very significant. So I'm curious to learn what you see coming down the pike that's going to make a significant difference.
00:27:34
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a great question. So number one, I would say, is controlled grazing. The technological advances in electric fencing that we've seen in the last 20 years is only going to continue to get better. Better energizers, you know, better materials, you know less fragile, you know, more more robust materials, lighter materials.
00:27:55
Speaker
Man, If there was one thing you could snap your fingers at to fundamentally change agriculture, it would be to to get all these farmers to start moving their cows around. That would enable us to double production in in a year. Now, right now, there's no pressure to come to it because cows are so expensive. And so nobody's caring. But once 2028 comes and the herd catches up and the price collapses, that'll give another shot in the arm now to managing our forages better.
00:28:24
Speaker
Another one I would say is the cottage industry food freedom movement. We're seeing more and more states develop cottage food laws. People are sick and tired of having to ask the government's permission to transact a food interaction with a neighbor. I'm promoting a food emancipation proclamation at the federal level to emancipate direct producer-consumer transactions from bureaucratic oversight.
00:28:50
Speaker
At some point, we need to we need to unleash the entrepreneurial capacity of farmers to access, to enter the marketplace, frankly, to compete at the marketplace level. Food freedom, the whole food freedom, freedom to market concept.
The Food Freedom Movement
00:29:05
Speaker
I mean, Maine now has the strongest food sovereignty law in the country. Wyoming is close behind.
00:29:10
Speaker
Kentucky has one. Utah has one. We're just seeing these come along, right along. ah Louisiana has ah has an effort going on right now. Those are developing Would a lot of that have to do with being able to have your livestock processed either on farm or at small, local, non-USDA inspected facilities?
00:29:29
Speaker
ah Yes, it would. But it would also enable you. here's Here's the big kicker. The big kicker. I mean, that's one. But the big kicker is to be able, as a farmer, to value add to the convenience sector. See, 75% of what food Americans are eating is ultra-processed. Americans didn't suddenly sit down one day and say, I want ultra-processed food.
00:29:53
Speaker
What they wanted was convenience and ultra-processed delivered it. So if we can deliver convenience without monosodium glutamate, without red dye 29, without you know a bunch of unpronounceables, there's no reason why a frozen chicken pot pie has to have monosodium glutamate in it.
00:30:10
Speaker
there's There's no reason. Okay. If under you know the general title of food freedom, if we if we can make the the the money right now is inconvenienced food, 75% of what food Americans eat. And that's the food that the farmers get so little of because it's ultra processed. You know, people aren't buying a squash and peeling it. They're not buying an apple and peeling it. They're buying a a frozen apple dumpling from Walmart.
00:30:35
Speaker
As the consumer dollar has skewed to these highly processed convenience elements, it has consistently cut the farmer's share of the retail dollar out of the equation.
00:30:48
Speaker
And so if farmers, if we're going to create room an opportunity for farmers to enter farming, we have to give them a bigger piece of the pie. We have to enable them to enjoy and get a bigger piece of that retail dollar pie. That is something that I think the food freedom, it's being driven by both non-farmers and farmers. Farmers are wanting it to be able to sell, but consumers are wanting to be able to buy, you know, an apple pie a quart of tomato juice, a chicken pot pie, homemade charcuterie, bologna. I mean, You know summer sausage, I mean, there are so many wonderful foods that we can make on the farm to re-embed the butcher, the baker, and a candlestick maker on the farm to allow the farmer to enjoy the retail income.
00:31:34
Speaker
That is a movement that's really, really gaining traction. and we'll make a change. Another one is mobile shade.
Diversifying Farm Income
00:31:42
Speaker
Mobile shade is moving forward rapidly. There are some real developments in the mobile shade realm, and that will be good for our pastures. It'll be comfortable for our animals. And that has been enabled by, in many ways, by nursery shade cloth development and bandsaw mills. Bandsaw mills which allow you to make shelters out of tinker toys. So the bandsaw mill, you obviously love trees like I do. One of the reasons that American forestry is so terribly managed is because there's no value in in timber. At stumpage prices, at wholesale stumpage prices, a farmer has to clear cut 500 acres to make a year's salary. Well, you know you just destroyed your whole woodlot. And so with a bandsaw mill, they're cheaper than a than a hay baler. You can now be in the in the milling business and with a bandsaw only taking a one-tenth inch kerf, you can make literally tinker toy pieces of wood that you can make lightweight infrastructure to create lightweight shade mobiles so that you can move your manure and your animal impaction around on the landscape more strategically than we ever could before. Those are things that I see really developing as we go forward.
00:32:55
Speaker
And presumably the bandsaw mills are going to allow farmers to pull additional income off of their farm and do so during the times of the year when otherwise they're often not making a whole lot of money.
00:33:06
Speaker
Absolutely. Woods work. Yeah, we do a little bit bit in the summer, but basically it's winter. It's winter work. The leaves are out. The bees are gone. The snakes are hibernating. And the sap is down. That's the time to work in the woods. And you can see what's going on.
00:33:19
Speaker
Part of that would be making lumber. I mean, our county, I don't know how many houses our county is producing every year. Let's just say our county is building, I don't know, 500 houses a year. Not two of them use local lumber.
00:33:31
Speaker
we're We're in the middle of Appalachia. You know, we're ah we're we're surrounded by forest. Our county has more than twice as many trees now as it did in 1860. And a lot of them are getting old and dying.
00:33:43
Speaker
Initially, they were cut in the initial colonial you know settler era. And then they were cut again during the the iron blast furnace time to make charcoal. And then the last time they were cut was during the height of the railroad industry to make ties and trestles.
00:33:59
Speaker
But since the railroad industry is gone and petroleum and electricity heat our houses, our forests are actually getting old and dying. And that's why we're seeing so many forest fires and stuff. So to be more strategic about weeding the woodlots and using that in composting in our own buildings that we do is a big deal. Bandsaw mills are a real positive development.
00:34:22
Speaker
Fantastic way to get more off of the farm with very, very little capital investment. That's right. Well, Joel, this has been a wonderful and very enjoyable conversation. Thank you very much again for giving of your time. I know you have a very, very full schedule and a large farm to manage and all of the things. So I really appreciate you being able and willing to share of your wisdom here.
Future Directions in Farming
00:34:44
Speaker
Thank you for having me on. It's been great to be with you, Austin.
00:34:48
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
00:34:59
Speaker
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